Posts Tagged ‘South Korea’

Seems like the Defcon and Black Hat conferences are ground-zero for spies with an information-warfare bent: this report from Computerworld discusses the ejection of four South Koreans apparently posing as journalists at Defcon. Any article that name-checks the Mossad and the French Foreign Legion in the same paragraph is worth reading.

3. Via Wired’s Danger Room, a Navy-sponsored report from Cal Poly on “Autonomous Military Robotics: Risk, Ethics, and Design.” The report alludes to the potential for “asymmetric response” to the increased use of military robots, but misses what I think is a central question: is the “man-in-the-loop” (or “tele-operator,” in the lingo of this report) become a legitimate military target for the opposing side? If so, does that not risk loosening the ethical barrier against “total war,” considering that many of these tele-operators may be on U.S. soil? The technology is moving too fast here to focus solely on the ethics of American use of military robots. Rather, the U.S. should take advantage of its lead in this area to drive an international convention defining the use and limits – the law of war, if you will – for robots as they exist today and might exist in the next five years.

The AP goes on to report that the popular blogger had been a regular critic of the government’s handling of the economy and was self-taught in economics, although he lied online about his credentials.

I’m sure the Asian financial crisis of the late ’90s in still very much in policy-makers’ minds. If anything, the arrest seems to reflect a fear that there are fewer effective policy mechanisms than there were a decade ago.